Montreal comedian Sugar Sammy’s bilingual show — which he will perform for the final time Thursday night at Place des Festivals as part of the Juste pour rire/Just for Laughs festival — has, in the four and a half years since its debut, become a smash with little precedent, the most successful solo comedy show this city has ever seen, and one that catapulted its creator from merely being a successful comic to becoming a bonafide star.

You’re Gonna Rire was funny, of course; we wouldn’t still be talking about it if it hadn’t been. But — and this is admittedly an odd thing to say about a comedy show — its hilarity almost came to be beside the point.

What Sugar Sammy crafted in You’re Gonna Rire was a thoroughly modern and resolutely inclusive vision of this city: bilingual, sure, but, it was more than that — an all-encompassing embrace of Montrealers, regardless of origin, all of whom were given the ultimate comedic privilege: the right to be made fun of equally.

It’s hard to overstate the degree of difficulty in what Sammy accomplished with You’re Gonna Rire. Through his comedy, his charisma and his evident sense of gratitude at the support he received from fans and the media for an ambitious concept that, if executed even a little bit off-key, could have become a far more polarizing endeavour, it quickly become clear this was one of those rare confluences of ideal messenger, ideal message and ideal time.

A personal anecdote: In July of 2011, Montreal Gazette restaurant critic Lesley Chesterman invited Sammy and me to dinner at Osteria Venti, an Italian restaurant in Old Montreal she was reviewing (and that has since closed). This was pre-You’re Gonna Rire, but Sammy was already a star on the rise; fans interrupted our meal several times to say hi, chat or take a picture with him, all of which he charmingly indulged.

But that’s not what I’ll remember most from that evening. During dinner, Sammy asked Lesley and me for our opinion on an idea he had been seriously contemplating: a bilingual comedy show. Not a tour or residency that would feature alternating English and French shows, but a single show that would be fully bilingual.

I’m pleased to say we both thought it was a fabulous idea. But I’d be lying if I claimed we had any inkling of the cultural phenomenon Sammy was about to unleash. Three months later, he officially announced You’re Gonna Rire, the show debuted four months after that, in February of 2012, and has since (along with his French one-man show, En Français SVP) been performed 420 times, selling more than 371,000 tickets and grossing a staggering $17.4 million in the process.

Unsurprisingly, You’re Gonna Rire wasn’t greeted with universal approval. Some of the more predictably reactionary pundits in the city issued predictably reactionary admonishments to Sammy, targeting everything from his linguistic miscegenation to his unapologetic crudeness to even nitpicking his utterly fluent French — which, as Sammy likes to point out, is his fourth language.

Let’s be blunt here: to a tiny, yet still occasionally influential segment of this province, Sammy will always be too English, too brown and too proud of being both of those things to ever truly be an exemplary Quebecer. But the staggering success and rapturous response to You’re Gonna Rire from the hundreds of thousands of people who actually saw the show overwhelmed any of the xenophobic sentiment that could have marred the party.

For a city still too often consumed by invariably silly, often embarrassing language flaps, You’re Gonna Rire was exactly the show Montreal needed: a heartening reminder that our differences, too often hijacked by some for political ends, are far more likely to bring us together than to divide us, and deserve to be celebrated.

So the final performance of You’re Gonna Rire, to without a doubt the biggest live audience it’s ever had, is a bittersweet occasion: a celebration of its remarkable run, of course, but also a farewell: Sammy announced recently that, when the curtain comes down on all the You’re Gonna Rire madness, he’ll be heading to France in an effort to conquer that particular market — although he has promised to return home with new material in the near future. That’s a pledge to which many Montrealers will surely hold him.

But for now, au revoir, Sammy, and merci for the rires.

Sugar Sammy performs You’re Gonna Rire for the final time at 9 p.m. Thursday at the Place des Festivals in the Quartier des Spectacles. Admission is free.

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